Posted on 08/12/2021 7:12:33 AM PDT by Oldeconomybuyer
COPENHAGEN/FRANKFURT, Aug 12 - Orsted and RWE, the world's two largest offshore wind players, both suffered from lighter winds in the first half of the year, highlighting how profits in the booming industry remain tied to weather conditions.
Denmark's Orsted said wind speeds in the April-June period were "significantly lower than normal" and ranked among the worst three quarters in over more than 20 years.
As a consequence, it said it would likely hit only the lower end of its guided core profit range in 2021.
Orsted was however confident that it wind speeds would return to more normal levels.
"Over time the wind speeds have been incredibly stable. We build wind farms that have an average life time of 30+ years and we have no reason to believe that this is something which will structurally challenge that," CEO Mads Nipper told journalists.
Orsted said quarterly wind speeds amounted to an average of 7.8 meters per second (m/s) across its offshore portfolio, which was lower than the 8.4 m/s seen in the second quarter last year and the normal wind speeds of 8.6 m/s it had expected.
(Excerpt) Read more at reuters.com ...
Looks like we have to blame God for the calmer winds. How do we bill him??
Burn coal then scrub the stacks. Let China and India clean up their act first
Ping
Oh No!
GLOBAL CALMING!
Marine Biologists have noted that the wind farms have caused the whales to change their songs.
The whales used to sing songs about sunny days and free food, and now their songs are about the headaches they get from running into the windmills.
Save the whales!
Reaping the whirlwind. A most unreliable crop, in any circumstance.
The world, like it or not, is going to be relying on “fossil fuels” for a long time yet.
All this investment and engineering COULD be going toward developing thorium-fueled molten salt nuclear power generation plants, but all the wrong answers have to be proven to be economically infeasible and environmentally unstainable first.
Beautifully done!
“...in the booming industry ...”
Booming only because science challenged politicians take our money and pour it into things that will NEVER prove capable of making a profit.
Ah, the media. They never lose a chance to confirm that their group does not consist of many folks who are on the right-hand side of the Bell Curve.
Well, here is real motionless for you.....4 (out of 5) 6 MW IWTs are shut down. This was a controversial project that certainly seemed to be beset by a lot of problems right from its construction phase a few years ago. The article makes reference to ‘stress lines’ being found but of course all is downplayed as ‘routine maintenance’.
I’m very curious about this one... anybody live near there who knows what’s really going on?
Man's vanity is at its worst when making projections.
No common sense or logic shows you that it is all about political/people control and certain elite persons getting rich on the backs of the masses.
The sunlight that varies by the behavior of clouds challenging “solar power” and the variable winds that are supposed to power wind turbines, jointly call into question the meaning of “renewable” as well as “sustainable”. They clearly cannot mean 100% of what there proponents attribute to them. But hey both make for nice mining operations - mining the public treasury for subsidies that is.
Go Nuclear.
What! You mean that profits from wind energy depend on how much the wind blows? Who’d ever thought of that?
Coal will NEVER be cost competitive with natural gas again. Natural gas can meet stricter EPA limits without triple stage stack scrubbers. Coal with triple stage stack scrubbers still exceeds natural gas emissions in a kwh for meh basis. The EPA is moving to a common standard for all thermal plants so coal will need to meet those lower gas plant limits.
This is just the first stage of scrubber costs and it alone makes coal uneconomic compared to gas.
https://www.powermag.com/whats-that-scrubber-going-to-cost/
sulfer scrubbers are stage one, you now have to have mercury scrubbers and also particulate bag house or electrostatic precipatators for PM 2.5 capture. Even with mercury scrubbers coal still releases mercury to the environment natural gas by default has zero emissions of metals again coal will NEVER meet the same level of emissions. Coal is last century technology best left in the dust bin of history where it belongs.
This is the way to use coal. Leave the toxins in the ground and clean the syngas to analytical levels (<ppb SOx,NOx,Hg,PM2.5) then burn that cleaned gas in the same types of gas turbines you could just burn natural gas directly in. UCG works for areas without large reserves of shale or conventional gas such as Europe or some places in Africa. North America is awash with shale gas. Russia and the middle east have huge conventional gas reserves. Australia has shale and conventional gas as well. UCG also gets as deep unminable coal or seams off shore or too thin to mine. Syngas is more valuable as a feed stock for FT synthesis then to liquid alkenes such as octane, dodecane ect aka petrol and gasoil.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352854016300833
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